Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

Turning on her heel, she marches off as fast as she can without breaking into a run. Rapid footsteps multiply behind her, she hears the click of stilettos on the paving stones, gropes in her bag for the tiny Browning, not much, better than nothing, at least make a noise… It’s only one of the party couples. They stagger against the wall, the man’s mouth glued to the woman’s neck. Flat pasty faces surge forward under a streetlight, bearing down on Nadine. No question about this bunch! The Browning keeps them at bay. Nadine hovers for a fraction of a second, opposite the policeman. Here they won’t dare. The flat faces waver. A laugh of deliverance rises in her throat, just like long ago when the singing bullet toppled the rider at the ford into the green waters of the Ural river. A stone falls into this stifled laughter as into a black puddle. What if the policeman were a fake? Easy enough to arrange. He has the florid, affable face of a wine lover, but what does that prove?

This street is a bit brighter, livelier. A bus is pulling away. Nadine leaps onto the back step, hampered by her carrying case and her bag, and loses her balance as she fumbles to unhook the chain. Someone grabs her elbow, heaves her up, makes room for her. “Easy, Mademoiselle, you could spoil your looks that way… It would be a pity, you know!” The gentleman’s chivalrous smile fades as he sees that it’s not a little black purse she’s holding in her hand but a little jewel of a revolver and notices wildness in her hard blue eyes. Confidentially he whispers, “I’d put that toy back in my purse if I were you.” Nadine, her bag snapped shut, bursts out laughing. “My word! You love him that much, Mademoiselle, and he’s a bad lot?” She sees a plump clean-shaven chin, a pair of soft, brown, cynical eyes, a gold-striped tie. “No,” she rejoins in a truly detached voice, “still women can be such fools! It’s over.” The bus irrupts into the vivid lights of the Place du Havre.

At the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart, Nadine introduced herself to the porter with aplomb. “Madame Noémi Battisti.” The porter was busy with clients, but he inspected her obliquely, with a disagreeably lackluster stare. “Room 17, fourth floor to the left, take the elevator, Madame.” Nadine affected the same indifference, but her cagey, alert glance had a furtive charm. “Of all the lying little hussies with knobs on,” the porter crooned to himself, “this takes the cake or my name’s not Gobfin. Monsieur Battisti sports a fine pair of horns!”

Sacha kept the door locked. He opened it for her.

“Why do we have to stay in this flophouse, Sacha? The porter looks like a tubercular stool pigeon, which he certainly is, or a part-time pimp — which he probably is.”

Sacha laughed and took Nadine into his arms, without energy.

“The world is full of small-time scoundrels, why not enjoy them? It’s reasonably clean and it’s cheap. And the area is crowded with people every night. If they’re after me, they’ll probably start looking on the Left Bank or around the Étoile.”

The symmetry of Nadine’s features blurred, as though he was seeing her through running water. “I don’t care what you say, that fellow gives me the creeps… And the women, tittering behind every door. A sordid house full of sordid affairs…”

“Women’s affairs,” he shrugged.

Nadine turned away from him and lobbed her bag onto one of the twin beds, so awkwardly that it fell open and the Browning slid onto the yellow counterpane. As he moved to put it back, Sacha was struck by the fingerprints smudging the blue steel. “So you were playing with that, were you? Anything happen?”

“I was scared. Well, not really scared, but now I am. And the face of that pimp undertaker downstairs, and those threadbare carpets in the corridor…”

“Pimp I grant you,” said Sacha, straight-faced, “but undertaker, now, let’s not exaggerate…”

Nadine rubbed her hands over her face forcefully to wipe away the sensation of the black street, the black car, the dangerous enemy faces floating up at her. Her eyes reemerged, wider, ominously blue.

“They were singing: One little lady in pink, in pink, no, in white, in white… I thought it was all over… For me, anyway…”

She finished more quietly: “…and that I’d never see you again… Phew, I feel better…”

The matching lamps on the bedside tables glowed a seedy intimacy surrounded by hostile shadows. Sacha turned on the ceiling fixture: three anemic bulbs nestled in pink glass tulip shades. The room filled not so much with light as with a pinkish-yellow haze. Nadine sat on one of the beds, her head turned away. He saw an artery flutter along her neck and her hair tremble. He could see her from the back too in the mirror, the droop of the shoulders, one arm twisted back, one hand laid flat on the bedspread… He read fear in that neck, those shoulders, that arm, that hand, something worse than fear for all he knew. Overcoming his unfocused anger, he tried to sound as positive as possible. “Come on now, Nadine, we have nothing to be afraid of right now… Did you run into anyone?” (Suspicion, within him.) “Come, you and I, we’re old friends, you can tell me anything…”

“I want us to change hotels, I insist we change. Is it too late tonight?”

“Were you followed?”

“No.”

“I promise we’ll do whatever you want — but tomorrow. Why can’t you trust me? When have you ever known me to be reckless?”

What must be feared above all, in the struggle, is panic. Our nerves preserve the imprints of animal fears, of human fears, accumulated over millions of years. A moment comes when they disobey our will. We no longer know what we are.

“Have you had supper, Nadine? I’ll order something from room service.”

“No. Who could care about supper?”

D went to check the door; an old household lock, a small inside bolt, the flimsy wood would give way at the first shove… “And you expect us to sleep here?” asked Nadine as if she couldn’t believe it. “Could you sleep here?” “Why not?” He drew her to the window and opened it. The empty street below was punctuated by the halos of streetlights; higher up, a vast glow suffused the misty sky, iridescent with flickering light. Nadine leaned out into space with a pleasurable feeling. D upbraided himself: you don’t open a window at night without turning the lights off first. Now he did. Fifty feet down, shadowy doorways provided excellent observation posts. The beige carapace of a car crawled by, a puddle of grayish light marked the entrance to the hotel. D put his arm around Nadine’s waist. “I had a fright,” she said. “I was silly. Look down there. We could fall, and it would all be over in few seconds…”

“Where do you get these notions, Nadine? It isn’t like you. We battle on, we persevere, you know we’re right. Besides, it wouldn’t be over in anything like a few seconds. Just imagine the ambulance, the hospital, the blood transfusions, the injections, the inquest, the hairline crack in your spine that leaves you paralyzed for life… That was a really idiotic thing to say.”

“I know. It’s hard to end it. Give me a cigarette… You’re always so sensible.”

She was calmer now, as though returning to reality.

“I met Alain. Mougin knows. They’re looking.”

She related the encounter in detail. (Alain, Alain, he felt wounded by the name. Who? Alain? Impossible, surely, but why impossible? We are free agents. He sniggered: Now pay the price…)

“We’ve lost a few days’ head start, that’s all…” concluded D, his voice steady. “I’ve sown some clues to make them think we’re going to London.”

“They won’t believe anything you want to make them believe!”